Assessing the Threat: Public Health

This chapter describes three methods for assessing the impact of transfusion-transmitted infections on public health. In order of increasing precision and labor intensity, these tools are: 1. A blueprint for a structured, qualitative inventory and report, describing the relevant characteristics of the emerging agent, which helps to make ad hoc decisions and which identifies gaps in our knowledge. 2. Two more sophisticated “off the shelf” methods for the quantitative analysis of threats to blood safety are mentioned: the Biggerstaff-Petersen model and the European Up-Front Risk Assessment Tool (EUFRAT). The Biggerstaff-Petersen model estimates the number of potentially infectious donations, while EUFRAT also takes into account the components prepared from donations and the efficacy of various mitigating interventions. 3. Finally examples of quantitative studies of specific agents are mentioned: a donor-recipient transmission study and a cost-benefit modeling study. For this kind of analysis, no standardized recipe is available.